100 Books Like The Wall of Storms

Essentially a field manual for progressive organizers, this personal and engaging book offers hard-won insights into what works, what doesn’t, and how left-wing organizations can break the too-common cycle of isolation and marginalization and broaden their reach. Smucker imparts valuable lessons without being hectoring or pedantic; he is admirably generous and self-critical, and he writes like a real person rather than a jargon-spewing robot. This book reminded me why I got interested in politics in the first place and renewed my faith in our power to change our communities.

Most international relations scholars see oil as a side show that doesn’t fit into their big picture balance of power paradigms.

Colgan breaks the mold to narrate how the history of oil crises reveals core truths about international relations and how different-sized countries can use coercion within a subsystem to assert influence over larger powers.

Colgan attacks his field’s Mearsheimerisque, longstanding premise that military security and strategic considerations exclusively drive geopolitical relations. Instead, he utilizes oil geopolitics as a subsystem to show how countries coerce each other through a larger variety of means (military, economic, and leadership selection, to name three) with a wider variety of goals.

In my view, Colgan’s subsystem model allows for a deeper understanding of what motivates countries and what tools they have to influence each other to gain strategic benefits.   

Despite having been maligned for so long in the British academy, in this book Porter shows the continuing vitality of the intellectual tradition of classical realism for understanding power politics today. He gratifyingly sweeps away the dewy-eyed nostalgia for the so-called ‘rules-based order’ that supposedly crumbled on Trump’s election to the White House in 2016. In addition to usefully reminding us of all the hypocrisy bound up with liberal internationalism, Porter also forces us to reckon with the core question of all politics – how far power is needed to underpin political order. Although I demur from some of his conclusions, Porter scrapes the tablet clean, offering the possibility of a more forthright and meaningful debate. 

Barry Posen is a civilian expert in U.S. defense issues at MIT. This book influenced lots of foreign policy experts who have come around to accept the argument of Restraint that the United States ought to radically reduce its military commitments abroad, notably in the Persian Gulf. The book is a key source for my own because Posen shows why the U.S. military presence there has no real effect on the security of oil supply, threats to which are routinely and wildly exaggerated. Posen believes, therefore, that something like “prestige” or acting like a superpower because it can, better explains that expansive and wasteful military posture. 

When I was first attracted to exploration history, I was mostly interested in the 19th and 20th centuries, but wanting to understand its pedigree, I searched back to the great voyages of the Renaissance and kept running into books by Parry. He’s everywhere, and always insightful.

His most widely read book is The Age of Reconnaissance: Discovery, Exploration, and Settlement, 1450-1650. But despite its clunky title, Establishment is my favorite because it distills the whole story – its events, its technology, its intellectual foundations – into almost crystalline form. A wonderful place to begin, or to return to and consolidate whatever else you’ve learned.

In all of my observations of the web3 space, I’ve noticed that while there are plenty of radical propositions to completely disrupt how we relate to tech and finance, there’s often a lack of understanding of how we got here in the first place.

Reading this book helped me place our current situation onto the trajectory that neoliberalism has taken for the past half a century. The concept of hegemony from Gramsci, which Williams and Gilbert expand upon for the modern age, showed me how even in web3, we are not immune to the influence of neoliberalism.

I recommend this book to anyone looking to be able to identify the cracks in the system to shape a way where web3 could be useful in creating new institutions.

I have taught many books on “modernity” or the modern world. This is the one single volume I would pick for students on a deserted island. I love reading it and love teaching it.

Berger applies the most important parts of social theory in a readable way to analyze what it’s like to work, love, and live in a modern versus traditional society. He shows how modernization permanently generates “discontents.” We love it, and we hate it, and most of the critics of modernity can’t help being modern themselves.

There is a chapter on dueling, which students never forget! 

This is the most compelling explanation for why major wars have started over the last half-millennium. His thesis is very simple: countries are tempted to start wars to conquer their own continents, even if there is a low prospect of success, because the payoff is tremendous.

The U.S., which is the only country to have achieved continental hegemony, pays very little for the cost of its defense because of the protection of the Oceans, and is able to project power to support smaller countries draining the resources of the regional hegemonic candidates on other continents.

This book does not explain most wars, just the ones most likely to involve all of the great powers, nuclear weapons, and to have the greatest impact in terms of the deaths of millions, post-war international institutions, and the most wide-sweeping territorial changes.   

Zhu Xi (also written Chu Hsi; 1130-1200 C.E.) was among the very greatest Confucians both as theorist and as teacher. I love how contemporary his concerns seem; when he worries about students who are "just hurrying through the texts, reading for their literal meaning and taking little pleasure in them," he might as well be talking about most of us today. In Gardner’s fluid translation, Zhu’s millennium-old ideas about how and why to learn—ultimately aimed at becoming a “sage”—turn out to be remarkably relevant. 

Nietzsche said; “Only those with very large lungs have the right to write long sentences.” Montaigne was of the same opinion. He pre-dated Nietzsche in couching his philosophy simply and clearly in short, sharp aphorisms. Like Nietzsche’s aphorisms, they are often very funny.